“A John Waters Christmas Show”

Not every Christmas party has an electric chair decorated with twinkle lights, or a front-door wreath laden with thorns designed to snag the clothing of party guests as they enter. But then, not every party host is John Waters, the eccentric filmmaker who will dispense pearls of his holiday wisdom Tuesday at the Belly Up Tavern.

For the past 12 years, the self-described “Pope of Trash” has toured the country each December with the solo show “A John Waters Christmas,” which he describes as a “self-help show about my obsession with Christmas.”

During the 90-minute, R-rated program, the “Hairspray” and “Pink Flamingos” director will tell favorite holiday stories (like when the Christmas tree fell over on his granny and he re-created it in his 1974 film “Female Trouble”), his observations on Santa Claus and rival holiday mascots (“the Easter Bunny should be shot”), and the do’s and don’ts of Christmas gift-giving.

“I’m obsessed with the melodrama and excitement of Christmas,” Waters said in a phone interview from his Baltimore home last month. “Everyone should come to the show, even if you can’t stand Christmas on religious grounds, financial grounds, communist grounds, sexual grounds … .”

Wait a minute … sexual grounds?

“Of course!” said Waters, 66, whose campy filmography joyously celebrates the off-kilter exploits of drag queens, bad boys (and girls), pornographers, serial killers and sleazy characters. “Christmas is all about sex. Can you have sex in a chimney? I’m sure someone has thought of it. And in the (gay culture) bear community, Santa is a polar bear. Think about it. It’s very complex.”

He’ll also share his thoughts on holiday traditions he hates. Object of derision No. 1? The Easter Bunny.

“Even children know there’s no Easter Bunny,” he said. “It’s terrible when you’re in the mall and you see these poor women in those hot plush bunny outfits that don’t get washed every year. You also get the worst candy at Easter. And come on, do you really have to humiliate your children by making them look for hard-boiled eggs?”

Waters is also mystified by the finger-wagging parental warning that if children don’t behave, Santa Claus will leave sticks and stones under the tree instead of presents.

“I always wondered how bad you had to be to get sticks and stones,” Waters said. “I wasn’t a good boy, but I wasn’t a killer either. I wanted to be bad, but I just ended up being the voyeur of the bad kids instead.”

These days, Waters gets more presents than lumps of coal. Many of them are given by fans — a holiday bounty so enormous that he begs ticket-buyers not to bring gifts to his shows (mail them instead to Atomic Books in Baltimore and he’ll pick them up after the tour).

Waters’ favorite gifts — to give and receive — are books, particularly novelizations of bad movies. But whatever you do, don’t send him a gift card (“where’s the imagination in that?”).